u/10p_Freddos

Apologies in advance for the long stream-of-consciousness babble.

Doctor Who is unabashedly British. It’s built into the DNA of the show and the character. The character of The Doctor is a big ol’ fanboy of the human race, especially the Brits, through all of space and time and it adds a certain “tea and fish fingers” flavour to the series, and I am in no way saying to get rid of that aspect.

But what if there was a version of The Doctor that had reason to be angry with the humans - plenty of storylines go down that route for a few eps at a time. But what if instead we went with this resentment being a slow build up of repeated abhorrent actions of the British Empire being shown through a series of adventures one after the other (past and future)?

E.g: an episode touching on The Great Hunger in Ireland, an episode delving into the dark history of the Crusades, an storyline following an Aboriginal tribe during the “settling” of Australia.

Of course, the monster of the week would still be an alien or a monster of some sort, and there would be enough sci fi adventure high-jinks to keep the tone from getting too depressing, but the running theme would be this backdrop of the British Empire at its worst points - and for any of the stories that would be too morbid for the show to dig into (à la Irish Famine) then it could just be set in future/space Britain (eg the Plutonian Harvest Locust swarm on the tech/human hybrid colonies of the 17th British Empire).

I feel like the right writer with a talented actor/actress at the helm could make a great season/series of The Doctor slowly becoming disillusioned with this core part of his identity - with the undercurrent of subtext leading to the real heart of their disillusionment (and the reason the TARDIS has been bringing them to these terrible points of history) is not with the Human British Empire, but with his standing as a noble Time Lord, and what that means for the regard held for other species/peoples.

Which could maybe lead into a big finale where Time Lord supremacy mixed in with a bit of modern day “Britain for the British” bigotry plays the villain in the present. The companion(s) would be able to pull together some good ol’ Dr Who cheeseball motivations (recollecting all the heroes of the dark episodes) to save the day while also paving a way forward for The Doctor to deal with his Time Lord history in a positive way without whitewashing.

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Side-note: A nice way to begin this arc, or book-end it, would be a space-age retelling of The Sword in the Stone, in some future rebirth of The British Kingdom, with The Doctor taking the role of Merlin.

What is one small change that you think would improve the film?

Just want to get a fun discussion going and read some cool ideas.

Let’s say we’re talking about the incarnation after Billie Piper (if she is in fact the Doctor).

Should it be a Christmas episode? Or maybe an anniversary special event?

Do you think the Doctor being introduced in a specific historical era would be interesting? Or more or a far-flung-cosmic setting? Or modern day, as is usual tradition?

Would they be pitted against a classic villain? Or a new creation?

While we’re at it, who had the best introduction episode?

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